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energy is borrowed and paid back, the energy cost per leap is tiny.
    Here’s an association test for you. ‘Sack of potatoes’ is to ‘kangaroo’ as ‘rocket’ is to –
what
? One possible answer is a space elevator . In the October 1945 issue of
Wireless World
the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke invented the concept of a geostationary orbit, now the basis of virtually all communications satellites. At a particular height – about 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above the ground – a satellite will go round the Earth exactly in synchrony with the Earth’s rotation. So from the ground it will look as though the satellite isn’t moving. This is useful for communications: you can point your satellite dish in a fixed direction and always get coherent, intelligent signals or, failing that, MTV.
    Nearly thirty years later Clarke popularized a concept with far greater potential for technological change. Put up a satellite in geostationary orbit and drop a long cable down to the ground. It has to be an amazingly strong cable: we don’t yet have the technology but ‘carbon nanotubes’ now being created in the laboratory come close. If you get the engineering right, you can build an elevator 22,000 miles high. The cost would be enormous, but you could then haul stuff into space just by pulling on the cable from above.
    Ah, but you can’t beat physics. The energy required would be exactly the same as if you used a rocket.
    Of course. Just as the energy required to lift a kangaroo is exactly the same as that required to lift a sack of potatoes.
    The trick is to find a way to borrow energy and pay it back. The point is that once the space elevator is in place, after a while there’s just as much stuff coming down it as there is going up. Indeed, if you’re mining the Moon or the asteroids for metals, there will soon be
more
stuff coming down than goes up. The materials going down provide the lifting energy for those going up. Unlike a rocket, which gets used up every time you fire it, a space elevator is self-sustaining.
    Life is like a space elevator. What life self-sustains is not energy, but organization. Once you have a system that is so highly organized that it can reliably make copies of itself, that degree of organization is no longer ‘expensive’. The initial investment may have been huge, as for a space elevator, but once the investment has been made, everything else is free.
    If you want to understand biology, it is the physics of space elevators that you need, not the physics of rockets.
    How can Discworld’s magic illuminate Roundworld’s science? Just as the gulf between the physical and biological sciences is turning out to be far narrower than we used to think, so the gulf between science and magic is also becoming smaller. The more advanced our technologies become, the less possible it is for the everyday user to have any idea of how they work. As a result, they look more and more like magic. As Clarke realized, this tendency is inevitable; Gregory Benford went further and declared it desirable.
    Technology works because whoever built it in the first place figured out enough of the rules of the universe to make the technology do what was required of it. You don’t need to get the rules
right
to do this, just right
enough
– space rockets work fine even though their orbits are computed using Newton’s stab at the rules of gravity, which aren’t as accurate as Einstein’s. But what you can accomplish is severely constrained by what the universe will permit. With magic, in contrast, things work because people want them to. You still have to find the right spell, but what drives the development is human wishes (and, of course, the knowledge, skill and experience of the practitioner). This is one reason why science often seems inhuman, because it looks at how the universe drives
us
, rather than the other way round.
    Magic, however, is only one aspect of Discworld. There’s a lot of science on